The main objective of the MOSIPS project is to design and develop a policy-making decision support tool in order to significantly improve the quality of policies implemented by public authorities at any administrative level. Additionally, it aims to facilitate access to meaningful information to citizens about the expected consequences of policies designed for the region/locality/country/area they live at, promoting their engagement and active participation in the policy-making and implementation process.

In other words, the project aims to develop a user-friendly policy simulation system allowing forecasting and visualising the socio-economic potential impact of public policies. This will allow policy makers to make experiments with different socio-economic designs, with the participation of citizens and potentially impacted stakeholders, before a public policy is settled. It will also allow the different stakeholders to participate into the process and better understand different scenarios possible and their side effects.

Focus will be set on SME-oriented policies in order to manage the scope of Research and Development (R&D) activities. They have been selected given the importance of SMEs in EU Economy, and the R&D potential given by the nature of policies and impacts addressing this collective.

In sum, the goals of the project are to:

• facilitate the decision-making process by providing a tool to make experiments with different socio-economic designs;
• increase the efficiency in the implementation of policies by the graphic visualisation of the impact and benefits of the considered strategy, before the public policy is settled;
• provide mechanisms for exposing open data for the benefit of the public and other applications using the platform. These data would include data used as input for simulations and also the results of these simulations;
• boost the active participation of citizens and other stakeholders in the policy-making and implementation process, taking into account their feedback through social networks.

Policy Context

The relationship between government and citizens is undergoing fundamental changes. Around the world, government find themselves at a social and technological crossroad into which society claims for empowerment raise greater, fuelled by the opportunities and behavioural patterns being created by Web 2.0 and beyond technologies.

On one hand, governments are overcoming the difficult decision-making processes required for tackling a situation where multiple and very different variables take part, and within global and local dynamics that get more and more complex. They eagerly need better tools for policy-making, and new opportunities for being able to explain the public opinion and certain interests groups the measures they take. On the other hand, citizens wish to understand and participate into public policies, especially those directly impacting their lives, while collaboration from day-to-day citizens in the definition, design, control and implementation of public policies is mostly missing.

The MOSIPS project proposes to use advanced policy simulation systems, beyond current ones based on traditional mathematical modelling, in order to tackle this double-faced problem. The final aim is to develop tools for realistic but pluralistic modelling and simulation of the dynamics of complex systems and create new policy-making schemes with greater participation.

In summary, the rationale for launching the project is based on the following:

• Governments are overcoming a difficult decision-making processes required for tackling a situation where multiple and very different variables take part.
• Current models to simulate and forecast the policies impact fails in the prompt prediction of disruptive changes, such as the current financial crisis.
• Sources of data are currently not being exposed to applications in a homogeneous way but several initiatives in eGovernment are starting to share them using the approach of Linked Open Data.
• Citizens wish to understand and participate into public policies, especially those directly impacting their lives.

Description of target users and groups

The key end-users of the MOSIPS system are:

• Policy makers at different levels of governance. The solutions proposed by MOSIPS are dedicated to policy makers, mainly at regional and local level, in particularly, the departments responsible for the SME policy implementation and actions.
• SMEs, entrepreneurs and citizens. The MOSIPS solution will introduce the features to interact and demonstrate the results of the selected modelling polices to the wider audience throughout the social networks.

Description of the way to implement the initiative

MOSIPS will deliver a multi-agent based simulator for policy impact assessment and validation with features that advance the state-of-the-art in the field:

• It will use for its simulation public data resources.
• It will rely on Open Data Models in order to ensure the reusability of results of simulation and continuous improvement of models and practices.
• It will be specifically dedicated to public policies evaluation, flexibly adaptable to particular needs of given policy domains.
• It will form a compound of self-contained and reusable web components that will be available for further reuse and exploitation.
• It will provide a Visualization Interactive Module allowing a highly intuitive and usable graphical illustration of simulation results facilitating interpretation, learning and drawing conclusions as well as supporting real-time interactions.
• It will allow a direct involvement of citizens and different stakeholders in the simulation process.

Technology solution

The proposed MOSIPS architecture consists of the elements shown in Figure 1. Basically, the Policy Simulator system, fed by the repository built with aggregated raw data out of unstructured and poorly structured data sources, takes into account the agent-based models describing the dynamics of behaviour and decisions of agents and their interactions. The visualisation module will enable intuitive representation of policy modelling and simulation, and will provide methods of interaction with and navigation around the data, integrating social networks services for the citizens’ empowerment. Finally, MOSIPS shall provide mechanisms for exposing open data for the benefit of the public and other applications using the platform. These data would include data used as input for simulations and also the results of these simulations.

Figure 1: Main conceptual blocks of the MOSIPS architecture

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Technology choice: Open source software

Main results, benefits and impacts

MOSIPS’ results will be suited to craft policy options, giving social and economic stakeholders a decision arena visualising and illustrating policy insights, providing:

• Significant improvement of the quality of policies implemented by public authorities at any administrative level. This will allow for substantial costs savings and efficiency improvements related to policy design and execution.
• Intuitive access to meaningful information to citizens about the expected consequences of policies designed for the area they live at.
• Engagement and active participation of citizens and other stakeholders in the policy making and implementation process.
• Policy-making best practices and valuable open source of information for higher levels of public decision making.

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Track record of sharing

MOSIPS will be developed as a modular system in order to assure scalability and transferability amongst different nature of policies and different governance levels, and to increase the potential to strengthen the competitive position of European industry (including SMEs) in modelling, simulation and visualisation tools as well as increased potential for wider use of those tools beyond EU level.

Lessons learnt

Scope: Local (city or municipality), National, Pan-European